Sade’s Blog

Today’s Jan’s birthday. Happy Birthday!!! And since I’m a poor student and can’t buy him the gadgets I’m sure he’d love to get as pressies, I made him a cake. I also got him a movie, but it was on offer ;-)

It’s very moist here, and so it makes the 25ºC or so feel like a lot more. And really, who wants to bake for hours when the weather is so sticky. So we settled for no-bake (nearly) cheese cake, but made with tofu, because it’s a bit healthier ahem.

Ingredients:

• For the cookie base:
  • 120 grams cookies (Graham crackers, McVities, Maria… whatever rocks your world)
  • 40 grams butter (this is about 3 tablespoons)
• For the tofu layer:
  • 300 ml pineapple juice
  • 2 tablespoons agar-agar
  • 90 ml lemon juice
  • 5 to 6 tablespoons runny honey
  • 1 teaspoon lemon oil / essence
  • 450 grams tofu
• For the gelled topping:
  • 100 ml red berries syrup (the kind used for cocktails)
  • 300 ml water
  • 2 tablespoons agar agar
  • 1 tablespoon lemon juice
  • bunch of red currants and raspberries

Make it:

1. Preheat the oven to 175ºC / 350 F (this is the only time you’re gonna use the oven, I promise). Whizz up the cookies in a food procesor until sandy, then add butter and whizz some more until it looks like wet sand. Line the bottom of a springform pan with baking paper, press the cookie slash wet sand into the base of the form. Bake for ten minutes until nicely golden, turn off the oven and breathe deeply.
2. In a small saucepan, heat the pineapple juice until steamy, add the agar agar, and cook, stirring, until completely dissolved, about 5 minutes. Cool for about five minutes.
3. Using the blender of your choice, blend the tofu, the pineapple juice with the agar agar, the lemon juice, lemon essence, and honey, until smooth. Pour over baked cookie base, put in the fridge, and have an iced tea, or two. Let the tofu layer chill for at least two hours, four is even better. A few more won’t hurt.
4. In a small saucepan (clean, please :p), heat the red berries syrup with the water and lemon juice until steamy, add the agar agar, and cook, stirring, until dissolved, about 5 minutes. Let cool as much as possible without setting. Pour over chilled tofu layer. Decorate with berries. Chill in the fridge until completely set, about 3 to 4 hours, or even better, overnight.
5. Cut using a long sharp knife, serve yourself a generous portion, sit back, dip the spoon into the cake, and let it melt on your tongue. Or in short: Enjoy!

Yield: One 26 cm cake, 8 to 10 portions.

Wanna see the full cake before it was cut?

We usually only eat chocolate chip cookies when we stop at Subway to eat when we’re out shopping in Aalst. And that happens once every two-three months. Oh, their local specialty? Veggie Pattie! Direct way to my heart, with loads of veggies, jalapeños and chipotle sauce. Then a coffee with a free chocolate chip cookie of your choice nom nom.

This week I found chocolate chips (meant to use for melting for a chocolate fondue, techincal detail) in the supermarket, and decided on baking chocolate chip cookies. LiveLoveKnit from the #knitty chat recommended me this recipe from Smitten Kitchen and I liked it. It has metric measurements ¹. So off I went to make these cookies and of course I had to modify the recipe, because you all know me! The result:

On to the modified recipe, shall we?

Chocolate Chip Cookies With Added Ooohmp

Grab the ingredients:

• 80 grams granulated sugar
• 10 grams vanilla sugar²
• 100 grams light brown sugar (in this case, I used light cassonade de candi)
• 110 grams unsalted butter, warmish but not melted, chopped in small pieces at random³
• 1 egg
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence⁴
• 1 tablespoon runny honey
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon⁵
• 1 teaspoon baking soda⁶
• 175 grams flour
• pinch salt
• 200 grams chocolate chips

Make them:

1. With electric beaters and lots of patience, cream together butter and sugars, until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Yep, that long. Add honey, cinnamon, vanilla essence and egg, and beat again till mixed properly.
2. Shift together baking powder, salt and flour. Add to butter mixture and mix in very well, but do not overmix. Clean the beaters with a rubber spattula. You know how much dough they keep? Add chocolate chips and fold in with spattula.
3. Stick dough in fridge for at least a couple of hours until quite firm.
4. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 150ºC / 300F, and line two or three cookie sheets with baking paper. Make balls with the dough about 4cm in diameter. Place nine per cookie sheet. Flatten if you want the thin cookies that I got, otherwise let them be round.
5. Stick in oven for 15 to 18 minutes, until nicely golden. Remove from oven and let cool in the cookie sheet until firm, at least 10 minutes, then transfer to rack to finish cooling.
6. Eat with delight, slightly warm even better!

Yield: approx. 30 dosis of sin.

They’re so good, even our little kiss furball (freeby from certain very famous cola drink) wanted to eat them while I was taking pics of them:

 
 
da footnotes:

Lets start by saying how nice and lovely and sweet Jan is. While I was in Spain, taking exams (better not talk about those grumble), he went to Aldi and bought me an Ice Cream Machine! Yesh! All for us! He told me he had bought me a surprise that day, and I wondered if it’d be the ice cream machine I had been showing him for the previous week. But I didn’t ask, wanted to be nice ;) In the end he told me, and I was already looking forward to make ice cream!

Fast forward to last friday (the previous was around the 20th June). I finally had time and peace to make the base of the ice cream. I decided on plain vanilla, because you can’t go wrong with vanilla ice cream. I followed the recipe that came with the ice cream machine, and got a nice vanilla custard that I let chill for a full day - while the ice cream machine bowl froze. Then I set up the machine, poured the custard, set it to “soft serve” and let it work for 30 minutes. Lovely result, a sweet intoxicating vanilla icecream. Simply delicious:

You can see how creamy and soft it is in those pictures. And yes it has vanilla speks from using a real vanilla pod and scrapping all the seeds so the ice cream would taste like real vanilla and not those chemically loaded ones they sell out there.

Basic Vanilla Ice Cream

Ingredients:

• 3,5 dl milk (I used half-skimmed)
• 2 dl cream (I used 30% fat)
• 1 vanilla pod
• 150 grams sugar
• 3 egg yolks

Make it:

1. The day before you want to make ice cream - yes it’s time consuming in the waiting department, it is definitively no instant gratification here - make your custard, and put the ice cream machine bowl to freeze. You want a good 24 four hours of cold in that!
2. In a deep sauce pan, heat up the milk and cream, with the vanilla pod. Make sure to slice it in half lenghtwise and scrap all the seeds. Once it’s reached boiling point, remove from the heat and let cool with the pod still inside.
3. While the milk cools down, whisk the egg yolks with the sugar until foamy and creamy. When milk is warm, remove vanilla pod and add milk to eggs slowly while whisking non-stop to keep the custard from going, well, custardy and lumpy before time.
4. When the eggs have been warmed up by part of the milk, add the egg mixture to the rest of the milk and heat the pan again. Do not let it boil and stirr constantly. When custard has thickened, about 10 minutes, remove from heat, pour in a bowl, and cover.
5. Chill your custard to fridge temperature, ideally over night (that way the machine has less work to do!). Once everything is nicely cold and chilled, assemble your machine, pour the custard in, and let it do its thing for around 30 minutes.
6. Dive in, enjoy.

Yield: One liter of frozen orgasmic vanilla ice cream.

A couple of months ago I bought a jar of chunky peanut butter at the local Aldi. It was the “American Week” and I was curious about this ubiquitous ingredient in certain baking recipes and the also famous PB&J sandwich. Reports of friends and family trying peanut butter as is, or in a sandwich, had put a warning in my brain, but still I tried a bit, for the shake of experimentation. The result, I can say, is I do not like peanut butter as-is. It’s too sweet, with an underlying saltiness, and way too sticky. Both in consistency and in flavour. Not for me, I’ll stick with Nutella thankyouverymuch.

So off I went to decide what to do with this peanut butter, and thought cookies was the way to go. If we didn’t like them at home, Jan’s coworkers would get rid of them in no time. They don’t say no to free food! Seeing as I’m trying to bake my way through (selected recipes from) Vegan with a Vengeance, I chose their “Big Gigantoid Crunchy Peanut Butter-Oatmeal Cookies”.

Off to the kitchen with all my stuff I went. Because for once I had all the ingredients at hand, yes. And started mixing everything. May I say, thank you so much for (metric) weight and volume measures of the ingredients? Whoever came up with baking by cups should be tortured to the failing cake every single time muahahaha. Anyway, mix I go and so on and so forth, the goop called cookie dough was softer than I expected. The recipe says:

The dought will be very firm and moist.

This was slightly confusing, because a cookie dough that is at the same time firm and moist does not compute in my brain. Anyway, being sure as I was that I has weighed all the dry ingredients, and measured in ml all my liquids, I thought the dough I got should be good enough as is, even tho scoopable rather than shapeable. So, instead of packing 5 tablespoons in a cup to make a single cookie, I scooped a portion the size of a small icecream ball, and let it glop down to a flatish shape on its own accord.

My biggest surprise came after baking. This took longer than stated for my smaller cookies, too. I went up to 12 minutes in the oven for my “slightly less than 2 tablespoons of dough per cookie” cookies, instead of the 8-10 minutes the recipe recommends for “normal-size” cookies. So yes, they take longer. They don’t really turn nicely golden brown, at all. They do puff up, and then take over the cookie sheet and join the other cookies and sooner or later they’ll be bossing you around. And the worst part: they came out of the oven softer than they went in. This was a big (bad) surprise. Yes, recipe also says:

Allow to cool at least 10 minutes to firm up before moving off the baking sheet.

What it doesn’t tell you is the bottoms of said cookies will be completely sticky, and that even if you move them with great care, after a good 15 minutes resting, they will will try to make a Dalí clock but with cookie and a cake spatula. This also caused an accident by which I lost 3 cookies: When I took the tray out of the oven, a barking mut was driving me insane, and thus I moved too fast, the paper liner slid over the tray, and three too soft cookies colapsed into a useless pile of dough.

The resulting cookies are far from crispy, the only crispiness in them is the pieces of peanuts from the chunky peanut butter. They’re too sweet as well, even tho I used sugar that’s less sweet than normal sugar. And they’re kind of oily as well. After several days, they haven’t dried out, which is nice, but they’re still more chewy than I like my cookies. I don’t think I’ll repeat this exact recipe, maybe if I can find something that’s dryer and crunchy I’ll give peanut butter cookies another try. And now that you’ve come this far reading, mandatory food pic:

I had a bunch of over-ripe bananas in the fridge, and rather than throwing them away, I decided to bake with them. I’ve made Banana Bread Muffins before, that were a bit on the heavy side, so I didn’t want to repeat that recipe. I looked for a Banana Cupcake recipe, since cupcakes are usually lighter than muffins. I found one I liked, but it was too heavy in the eggs department. I didn’t fully veganize it, but I cutted eggs in half. The resulting recipe follows:

Ingredients:

• 3 very ripe bananas, mashed
• grated zest and juice of one lemon
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 cup milk
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• 2 cups self-raising flour

Make them:

1. Preaheat oven to 200C and line with paper cups two muffin trays (you will need 18 at least)
2. Melt the butter with the oil (microwave for 30 seconds). Let cool a bit. Meanwhile, in a big bowl, mix the bananas with the lemon juice and zest. Beat in eggs and milk. Add the butter-oil mixture.
3. Add nutmeg and sugar, incorporate well. Add flour and mix well, until incorporated, but not overbeating. Fill cupcake liners just a bit below the rim. Bake at 175C for 18-20 minutes, until a toothpick inserted comes clean but moist and top is light golden and sproungy.
4. Let cool on rack. Scarf them

Yield: 18 cupcakes, but don’t expect them to last long.

That is how a friend named the truffles I made for her.

Truffle-Bonbon

Ingredients:

• 240 grams milk chocolate
• 150ml crème fraîche or sour cream
• 1/2 teaspoon fresh ground pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 4-6 cloves
• pinch salt
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1/4-1/2 cup bitter cocoa powder

Make them:

1. In a small saucepan, melt the crème fraîche. When it’s warm, add the spices and let rest for half an hour (also known as infuse). Remove the cloves, add salt, and reheat.
2. Chop the chocolate in small pieces and add to the warm crème, removing with a wooden spoon until it’s completely molten and shiny. Do this over a very low heat, and removing the saucepan often from the heat source. Add the butter and incorporate it completely. You now have a tasty ganache.
3. Line a 15×20 dish with baking paper so that the paper overhangs on the shorter sides. Pour the ganache in and smooth the top with a rubber spatula. Lick clean your wooden spoon and rubber spatula once you’re done. Stick the dish in the fridge overnight.
4. When the ganache is completely cool and solid, remove it from the dish and put it on a cutting board, using the baking paper to move the ganache and as a base for cutting. Put cocoa in a deep dish. With a knife, cut squares of ganache, transfer them to the cocoa, and roll them around so they are completely covered in cocoa. Trasnfer to small baking paper cups for a nice touch. Return to fridge, and enjoy them by twos!

Yield: not enough :)

I promised some food pr0n a while ago.

Summary: Spicy Indian Rice with Toasted Almonds and Marinated Italian Tofu with Assorted Veggies, both recipes adapted from Vegan with a Vengeance. I made a list of recipes from the book I want to try, and I’ll cook my way (more or less, you know, can’t follow a recipe to save my life) through it. And probably I’ll do the same with other cooking books.

Suck.

These next three weeks are basically devoted to flattening my butt (more) studying (more) for exams, and then sitting those exams. And then hoping I have passed, because I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve sitted said exams, and it’s really getting on my nerves (and that’s being very very polite about it).

Anyway, I doubt I’ll post as much as I’ve posted these past weeks, not like it matters much, does it? I still have to post a couple pics of the last delicious meal cooked over at Jan’s. Maybe I’ll post some rant or so, when I need to yell or else my brain might implode-explode.

And I just noticed the spam counter has gone over the 20k mark. It only took 450 days… (No, I didn’t count them, I used this tool)

Not joking, really. Even when I bake I have to change a little something at least, or I won’t be happy.

So well, I saw a couple of weeks ago a recipe that sounded interesting: Marmalade Tofu with Kale and Lemon Pearl Couscous, and thought to myself “Hey, this sounds interesting, gotta try it”. But of course, I failed in following the recipe, because I’m like that. My version is “Marinated Tofu with Bai Cai, Garlicy Shiitakes and Couscous”. In truth, they are four different dishes served together, with the Tofu as main, and the other three as sides. It’s a full meal, and delicious.

Recipes after the cut! Read more »

So today I had time to bake, and Zanne, our lovely Knitty Zanne (who is internet-less for the Spring and Summer), had asked quite a few times I made a recipe for cookies using real espresso. And today was the day.

As always, I guess you want to know how to make them yourself, so I’ll direct you to the lovely database for the Espresso Cookies recipe.